The Listings: June 10 -- June 16; KAY ROSEN

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: June 10, 2005

No contemporary artist has done more with fewer words than Kay Rosen. Inaugurating a new Chelsea gallery, Ms. Rosen, who lives in Gary, Ind., and teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, presents word-works on canvas, paper and the wall that refer with sly understatement to the 2004 presidential elections. In one neatly made colored pencil drawing the first three block letters of the word ''blurred'' are rendered in blue, the last three in red and the ''r'' in the middle in purple. It is a finely distilled comment on the inane red-state-blue-state formulation. A painted mural, above, is more puzzling. It takes a while to figure out that the letters P N U U M L D E -- alternately painted black and gray and diminishing in height toward the middle -- resolve into the word ''pendulum'' when you read back and forth one letter at a time from outside to inside. This is typically layered: your gaze swings like a pendulum and, in the context of the show, that reflects the right-left swings of political sentiment in America as exemplified, for example, by the sequence Bush, Clinton, Bush. (Gray Kapernekas Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, (212)462-4150, through June 18.) KEN JOHNSON